I first saw Caitlin Thomas at a party given by Maya Deren in her apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. I saw only the bottom half of her, her legs, thighs, and cotton underpants, because she was holding her dress up over her head as if she was pulling it off, or hiding behind it like a child. She was dancing, a sort of elementary hootchy-kootch that didn’t have much to do with the fast Haitian drum music that filled the room.
Maya was dancing, too, barefoot, with bells on her ankles. She had just come back from Haiti, where she had been studying Haitian dance and mythology. Maya was also an avant-garde film maker, an avant-garde everything. Short, stocky, with a dark red, before-its-time Afro, she looked like a Little Orphan Annie who had been kidnapped once again, this time by art.
While Dylan Thomas was the proclaimed guest of honor, Maya was always the real guest of honor at her parties. She had made sure of this with the tapes of Haitian drumming, because none of the poets and literary camp followers she had invited seemed willing to get out on the floor with her.
So it was mano a mano between Maya and Caitlin. I had yet to see Caitlin’s angry, intellectual milkmaid’s face. I hadn’t realized who it was beneath the dress until I asked a slender, elegant young man next to me. That, he said, with an irony that was the chief ingredient of the new American poetry, is Caitlin Thomas.
It was like a war of worlds out there on the floor: the childbearing, cottage-keeping, pub-crawling wife of the Welsh bard against a rising star of Greenwich Village. Caitlin relied on the immemorial argument of bump and grind, while Maya, who wore trousers, danced not exactly to the tapes but to the different drummer of the American art establishment. I wondered who would win and where Dylan was. Was he hiding his face, too?
He was in the bedroom that opened off the studio, in a corner where he was surrounded by slender young men. It was as if they had thrown up a picket fence to protect him, not only from Caitlin but from America, from criticism, from mortality. He was no longer the pretty, pouting cherub of the Augustus John painting, but a man swollen by drink, and by sorrow, perhaps, or poetry. He looked like an inflatable toy that had been overinflated.
You forgot Dylan’s faults when you read his poems or heard him recite, but he was not at his best at parties. To him, an American party was like being in a bad pub with the wrong people. He appeared to have no small talk - or hardly any kind. The slender young men bounced off him in disappointment.
The party had come to a drumming halt. It was a standoff between Maya and Caitlin. Each succeeded in making the other ridiculous. Never lacking in decision, Maya walked over to Caitlin and tried to usher her off the floor. Caitlin resisted, and one of the guests tried to help Maya remove her, but she broke loose and threw a straight overhand right that Sugar Ray Robinson would not have been ashamed of. It caught the officious guest squarely in the eye and he staggered back with his hand to his face. He would have a shiner as a souvenir of the Thomases. As I looked admiringly at Caitlin, I remembered reading or hearing that she and Dylan often fought and she always won.
Now she was genuinely aroused. Hell hath no fury like a famous poet’s wife. Maya had brought back a collection of small ceramic Haitian gods, which were arranged on the mantelpiece, and now Caitlin began hurling these against the wall. If she had really tried, Maya could have rallied enough support by now to stop Caitlin, but she couldn’t resist the symbolism of the scene. Plunging her fingers into her curls, she cried, like an Ibsen heroine, She’s smashing my universe!
This woke Dylan, who had been dozing on his feet in the bedroom. Caitlin was smashing the universe again. He rushed, or rolled, into the studio and seized her by one arm. Then, leaning back, using his weight, he began to swing her in a wide circle - it was a large room - like a game of the Snap the Whip. It was the only safe way to deal with her. He must have worked it out on previous occasions.
There was a wide opening between the studio and the bedroom and, with a surprising dexterity, Dylan swung Caitlin through it and landed her on the bed, where he immediately sat on her. It was a remarkable performance, like a perfect enjambment in a poem. But he was winded by his exertions - this was more tiring even than writing or declaiming poetry - and Maya gave me the job of holding Caitlin down.
It wasn’t easy - she was very strong - so I had to more or less lie on top of her as Dylan had. I held my head back because I thought she might bite me. After a minute or two she stopped struggling and her face grew thoughtful. She looked alert, shrewd, very Welsh. Are you queer? she said.
I was still unsophisticated enough to be annoyed by the question. No, I said. I’m not.
She threw her arms around my neck. Then for God’s sake, man, she said, love me! Love me!
She was moving too fast for me. I didn’t even know whether she was drunk or sober, and I couldn’t think of a clever answer. I looked around and Dylan was standing, his back to us, just a few feet away. That would hardly be cricket, I said lamely, betrayed in my confusion into an antiquated English idiom.
Her face grew savage. Bugger the cricket! she said.
As the most expendable - or the only reliable - person at the party, I was deputized to take Caitlin to the Chelsea Hotel. Dylan was too drunk for such an extended effort - he couldn’t Snap the Whip her all the way up to Twenty-third Street - and besides, Maya was by no means ready to relinquish him. He was going to have to stand in for the Haitian gods.
Someone had a car and I held on to Caitlin in the backseat. She relaxed and made herself comfortable in my arms. When we reached the hotel the other man drove off right away and I took Caitlin up to their room.
She unlocked the door and turned to me. I’ll give you a drink, she said. We looked into each other’s eyes. Though I couldn’t read hers, I thought she could see what was in mine. She was too much for me, and I knew it. I had no idea what she was offering me. A drink? A surreptitious, secondhand kind of fame? A heart-to-heart talk about Dylan?
I made an awkward little bow. Thank you very much, I said. Another time. As I spoke I ducked and the straight right hand whistled over my head. Pushing her gently so I could close the door, I ran down the stairs.
Reproduced from Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard, Vintage Books, 1997